“The Last Lizard was a particularly memorable episode in Suelo’s attempts to test the philosophical framework for the moneyless life, in the years leading up to his decision. In a broad sense, he was trying out two theories about the good life. The first came to him courtesy of Henry David Thoreau. As a million pairs of soon-to-be-chapped lips have recited at the head of the Appalachian Trail, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

But before Suelo could begin to discover what the effects might be of living simply, free of artificial distractions and closer to the rhythms of nature, he had to prepare himself even to embark on such an experiment. He had arrived in Moab pickled to the gills – like 10 percent of Americans in the 1990s – on a skull-warping cocktail of Prozac, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin. When one antidepressant stopped working, they’d give him another, and when a few replacements crapped out, they’d give him another, and when a few replacements crapped out, they’d revert to the first. The problem with Zoloft was that it made his mouth dry and his brain fuzzy. Once, while being interviewed for the local television station about a Habitat for Humanity program he was launching, he got so parched that he started to stutter right there on camera. Then it seemed to him that the buzzing of the neon light overhead grew deafening. Worse, when he looked up at it, he discovered that there was no neon light – the buzzing was instead inside his skull. “Luckily no one watches that station anyway,” he says.

One day, blinking into the sun as he stepped out of the post office, he bumped into his former roommate, Linda Whitham. She asked how he was and he couldn’t fake it.

“Shitty,” he said. “I’m out of a job. Anxiety attacks. Life sucks.”

She looked at him with supremely kind eyes.

“Don’t worry about anything,” she said. “Not jobs or money. Until you find your health. That’s what’s most important. Concentrate on that.”

A little light switched on – not the buzzing neon in his head, but a pleasant bulb illuminating some forgotten corner of will. He resolved that day to cure himself of depression without the use of pharmaceuticals. He began splitting the pills in halves, then quarters, then eights, then finally he flushed the last of the particles down the toilet. His naturopathic friend Michael Friedman suggested a natural alternative, St. John’s Wort, which Suelo began brewing as tea three times a day.

“I started visualizing my thoughts,” Suelo says. “My mind was a weed garden of negative thoughts about people, things, myself. I thought: “I don’t care if it takes me until I’m eighty years old – I’m going to weed out this garden. That’s my priority.” I kept seeing these negative thoughts rising in my mind. Why do I hold on to them? It’s useless. I’d let it go.”

And slowly, living in his cave through 1997, his mental health improved. He would look up from what he was doing and notice that he hadn’t been unhappy in hours. The depression had begun to evaporate. Thrilled by the progress of his mind, he began to focus on his body.”

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About kayaerbil

I am a Berkeley educated chemistry Ph.D. who is moving into the area of working on developing appropriate technology for communities that are subjected to socio-economic oppression. The goal is to use simple and effective designs to empower people to live better lives. Currently, I am working with Native Americans on Pine Ridge, the Lakota reservation in South Dakota. I am working with a Native owned and run solar energy company. We are currently working on building a compressed earth block (CEB) house that showcases many of the technologies that the company has developed. The CEB house is made of locally derived resources, earth from the reservation. The blocks are naturally thermally insulating, keeping the house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Eventually, a solar air heater and photovoltaic panels will be installed into the house to power the home and keep it warm, while preserving the house off the grid. A side project while in Pine Ridge is a solar computer. I hope to learn about blockchain encryption software for building microgrids. In addition, it is an immediate interest of mine to involve local youth in technology education.

Poet: Data, Climate Change, the West, and the Islamic World

Dr. Kaya Erbil

kaya.erbil@protonmail.com

Atlanta, GA

I make money any way I can to finish a book of poetry on climate change, the West, and the Islamic World. Been working on this book for eight years. Features a raw and gritty personal story of mental illness. The book explores themes around religion, and tries to place a framework around the current War on Terror/global Islamic fundamentalist jihad. Relates technology and weapons of war to their basic scientific origin, digging deeper to find their mythological sources. Ending with a 500 year time travel journey to illuminate the public on the Islamic origin of Copernicus’s discovery, Arabic language semantics are explored to ask why the West gained a 500 year dominance. Back to 2018, faced with the existential dilemma of climate changed induced geopolitical apocalypse I will compare Islamic finance to Western capitalism and prove it to be superior as a framework for modern ecological economic. All these poems point back to the fight between Ishmael and Isaac. They both will realize that perhaps Ruth or Mary were the ones we should have written more about…